Marina Zueva/Igor Spilband, ice dancing Kingdom

The article about great Olympic coaches http://worldskating.blogspot.com/2010/02/ice-dancing-kingdom-of-marina-zueva-and.html

Thank you, Vlad.

Something very interesting has emerged from this Olympic FD. If we look at the top four couples in the final ranking, we see that two of these couples shared the team of Igor Shpilband and Marina Zueva as their coaches and choreographers. These two couples got first and second place. The 3rd and 4th place couples also shared coaches and choreographers this season, with their bios giving Natalia Linichuk sole credit for their choreography.

It seems to me that we may therefore choose to regard this as a duel between choreographers, or between coach & choreographer teams, between Linichuk's team and Shpilband's team--and Shpilband's team won.

I wonder how this will effect Linichuk's reputation and coaching career. It seemed that she served both teams pretty badly (in different ways of course).

Don't forget to give credit to Igor & Marina for teaching/training & choreographing for Belbin & Agosta up until they moved to Linichuk's camp. I think if they had stayed Marina would have given them a much more creative free program than what they skated to last night. They are the new wave of difficulty, speed & style in ice dance, I think. Linichuk & Karpanosov (?) are the past.